


Relics

by Grayswandir (gothic_gray)



Category: Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:15:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21835021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gothic_gray/pseuds/Grayswandir
Summary: After the death of Victor Frankenstein, Robert Walton begins his journey home.  But he soon discovers that it won't be easy to put Victor out of his mind.
Relationships: Victor Frankenstein/Robert Walton
Comments: 22
Kudos: 45
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Relics

**Author's Note:**

  * For [anticyclone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anticyclone/gifts).



  


Robert Walton, since his early youth, had dreamed many dreams of wild and dangerous quests. He had dreamed of traversing the remotest climes, of mapping undiscovered regions, of wrestling Jacob-like against the living wilderness to unearth secrets bizarre and incredible. But he had never in all his life dreamed up anything so deeply strange as the task he was undertaking tonight.

The high iron gate creaked under the weight of his body as he climbed, and it creaked again as he surmounted the spiked ridge and dropped silently to the ground. The earth was soft and slightly damp after two days of rain. He had left his shovel and lantern outside, but now, safely within the confines of the cemetery, he reached out between the bars to collect them, and pulled them through.

During his long walk from the town there had been moonlight enough to guide his steps, so he had kept the lantern dark. He struck a light now, kneeling on the damp ground, and watched the fire flicker and brighten in its prison of glass. That small blaze summoned in his imagination visions of funeral pyres, smoke shadows fleeting over arctic ice, and a frigid wind scattering ashes. He drew his coat more closely about him as he stood.

“I’ve come to bring you home,” he said softly, though not a soul was by to hear him. “My dear Victor, I have come... to bring you home.”

* * *

In point of fact, it was not for this purpose—not this purpose exactly—that Robert Walton had come to Geneva. He had come looking for something, something elusive and nameless, whose nature even now he could not articulate. But like so many of his most cherished pursuits, this one, too, had at last come to nothing.

The return to England after his disastrous polar expedition two years past had been fraught with hardship. Amid a suffering and flagging crew he had sailed southward, homeward, defeated and inglorious, through a wasteland of glacial debris that eloquently mirrored the wreckage of his own soul. Outwardly he had preserved a steady command, but his nights were sleepless, and a sense of terrible loss overwhelmed him. 

It was true that, though the way to his imagined northern paradise had been barred, his life’s ambitions were not yet absolutely forfeit. He was still a man in his prime, and all the future lay open before him. But the promise of fresh adventures offered little consolation, for he felt that in the course of his last, luckless journey he had already found, piteously adrift on the shattered glass of the arctic sea, his heart’s own beckoning lodestone. The polar star, that truest of celestial guides, had directed him faithfully to the very point where the line of his destiny converged with that of the prodigious, the astonishing, the utterly tantalizing Victor Frankenstein. 

Cruel fate! to have wrested from his bosom a friendship so new, and yet so dear! After the blow, he had steeled himself, knowing that the time was unfit for mourning; and with composure befitting a gentleman he had steered a safe course home. At heart, however, he felt that he had lost his way. His once steadfast and driven spirit now spun awry like a disordered compass, turning every direction with no just aim. The force that had once pulled him toward glory seemed to have vanished from the world.

In Archangel, he had parted from the remnant of his crew, his hired ship, and his captaincy. It was by then deep Russian winter, and even around the harbor, all was frost and ice. There were troikas for hire, but in such weather the journey by stages back to Petersburg threatened to exceed a span of two months, and he did not relish the thought of languishing all that long while in sledges and wayside lodgings along postal roads. Instead he awaited some merchant vessel bound for England, that he might buy passage and languish more comfortably at sea. 

Lighter vessels meanwhile passed in and out of the harbor, and by one bound for France he was able to send his letters on to Margaret. The sailor who took the carefully-wrapped oilskin parcel from his hands did not ask what precious document it contained, but must have wondered at his reluctance to part with it. It was the only treasure Robert had brought back from the north: the last words and the astonishing biography of his departed friend. Having sent it on, he felt that he had discharged all the duty that was left to him in the world. 

He himself did not make port at Sunderland until early March. It was snowing when he disembarked, and some part of him wondered whether the whole earth were now encased in snow. It had been more than a year since he had seen spring.

He was not sure it was something he even missed anymore.

* * *

During the voyage home, he had been longing to see his sister again. He therefore roused himself from his listlessness and hastened to her, hoping that the nearness of a beloved companion might help to dispel the chill from his bones.

It was not until he found himself in the familiar sitting room of her home, tousling her children’s hair in greeting and clasping her two outstretched hands, that Robert realized it was not a reunion with his dear Margaret that he had been anticipating and longing for, but rather a reunion with the manuscript that he had put into her care. By an effort, he refrained from asking about it until they were alone and had talked on other topics for some time. But perhaps she noticed his agitation, or the feverish brightness in his eyes, for she asked him several times whether or not he was quite well.

His first mention of the packet he had sent seemed to make Margaret more than a little uncomfortable. She looked at him searchingly, and appeared to be choosing her words with care when she said she had worried about him every day, and had read his letters with astonishment and incredulity. At length, it became clear that by _incredulity_ she did not mean _wonder_. She meant quite literally that she regarded the tale as a fabrication, even in spite of the appendix of corroborating documents that Robert had affixed to it. 

These documents included a collection of French love-letters, all transcribed in the same clumsy, childish, but very careful hand; several letters in German, addressed to Victor Frankenstein and signed variously with names that the accompanying manuscript should have made poignantly familiar; and even, finally, Victor’s own pocket journal, still largely intact, with only a few pages torn out or scribbled violently over. Robert had further added to these pages a considerable number of sketches of his own, for he had spent many hours, during the long journey back to Archangel, attempting to render on paper the strange scenes he had witnessed—sometimes hoping to purge from his mind the hideous aspect of the daemon by channeling it into ink, as if he could magically summon and bind it there; other times, conversely, striving to hold and preserve in his mind the memory of his erstwhile friend by the act of lovingly tracing his features over and over again, as if to summon and bind him, too. 

Margaret watched in silence as her brother conducted an item by item inventory of all the papers he had compiled, touching and arranging each one. The attention he paid to them seemed to make her unhappy, and he saw her fidgeting anxiously with the fringe of her shawl, twisting and looping it around her fingers, as she often did when Robert began expounding to her some new scheme for glory. She seemed to imagine that he was projecting further expeditions, or an epilogue that would soon send him off once more into the wild, rather than rehearsing events already past. 

She knew what he was like when an idea took hold of him, and perhaps she understood even better than he did that although the two of them sat together late into the night beside the same fire, only one was fully present. A part of Robert remained captive in the Arctic, and there was no telling when, or if, he would ever really come home.

* * *

Robert did not miss the frigid polar wind, or the slow chill that penetrated every layer of clothing, or the ominous creaking of ice all around, day and night. But he remembered with a certain sad pleasure how, in that atmosphere of relentless and crushing cold, he and Victor had stood shoulder to shoulder on the deck of his ship, facing a prospect of endless mist.

Victor had been watching for signs of his quarry, his keen eyes narrowed with concentration, his body tense as a spring. Robert, for his own part, had been watching Victor—watching the subtle changes in his face that betrayed a momentary glimmer of hope, or a relapse into despair; watching him blink away the delicate white crystals that formed on his lashes, gritting his teeth against the chill. He watched with sympathy and admiration, marveling that a man of flesh and blood, traveling alone on the open ice, should ever have made it so far north alive. That in a mere week’s time this same man, who at first had seemed to be teetering on the brink of death, had already recovered strength enough to stand guard on deck for several hours, appeared a positive miracle. Surely he was something more, or something other, than human. His every action seemed to betray a spark of divinity.

Robert watched him draw his collar closer about his throat, expelling a shivering breath. 

“My dear Frankenstein,” he said, “you must be weary. Had you not better return to the cabin and rest awhile?”

Victor’s gaze remained fixed on the horizon, but a melancholy look came into his eyes. “It is no longer in my power to rest,” he murmured. “Waking or dreaming, I pursue him still. And still he evades me.”

He had a habit of speaking this way, as if in private soliloquy, without explaining himself. It seemed indecorous to pry, so Robert merely reminded him: “My men have instructions to keep a sharp eye out for the man you are seeking. Rest assured, they will report to me at once in the event of any news. It is a week now since the ice began to break, and there are perils all around. Perhaps the daemon, as you call him, is already dead.”

Victor appeared to shudder involuntarily at these words. He looked down at his hands, then toward the horizon again. “Dead?” he repeated. “Yes, indeed. He may very well be. And yet—he lives.”

After a mysterious pause, he turned his eyes to Robert and added gently, “Forgive me, Captain Walton. I fear my circumstances have rendered me a very troublesome guest, as one who will take no medicine must seem a troublesome patient. Please do not imagine that I am unmoved by your concern. It touches me deeply. But I must follow through what I have begun.” 

“On the contrary, you have been anything but troublesome. Nor does your unwillingness to be confined below deck deserve any reproach. I only fear that your recovery will be delayed by these exertions. You are still very weak.”

Victor frowned, but seemed to know that he could make no credible objection. For several hours, he had paced about the deck without support, returning at intervals to his lookout post to scan the mist for signs of life. Gradually, however, the strength had begun to go out of his limbs. He now stood braced against the bulwarks, unsteady and visibly shaking. Robert, detecting in his protracted silence an inclination to relent, offered an arm to help him inside.

“Very well,” said Victor, as though conceding generously to the terms of a treaty after meticulous review and correction. “I pray your men will be vigilant.”

Robert led him back into the cabin of the ship, and after depositing him at the edge of the spare bunk that had been arranged for him, he urged him to lie down, and began piling him with blankets. “You really must try to stay warm,” he said, and felt a little surprised by the remonstrative tone of his own voice, which betrayed greater anxiety than he had intended. His alarm was not, however, without warrant. Perhaps owing to the sudden change of temperature, Victor had nearly fainted on the stairs; and though he now seemed alert enough once more, he continued to shiver violently. His flesh was translucent as ice, and marbled with the same bluish tinge, like the flesh of a new Adam wrought of snow rather than dust.

When the bedding was suitably arranged, Robert removed his own gloves, then reached to pull Victor’s off as well, and chafed his hands to warm them. Victor observed this process with a look of detached and introspective curiosity. After a moment, when some sensation and mobility had returned to his stiff fingers, he stilled Robert’s hands by taking them in his own.

The gesture seemed to portend some confession, or perhaps some delicate inquiry, or some difficult request. Robert waited, but moments passed, and Victor said nothing. His hands were still ice cold.

“Let me fetch you some soup from the kitchen,” said Robert, shifting his weight slightly on the bed as he moved to stand. Victor stopped him.

“My good Captain Walton,” he said. “I am much obliged for your exertions, but I fear they are in vain. You will not understand, but must believe me when I assure you that the weather here, however inclement, and my health, however frail, are at present the least of my torments. I am resigned to discomfort, and will bear up as long as need be. I do not expect that I shall ever be warm again.”

“If you would be more comfortable by the stove—” 

“You misunderstand me,” said Victor. He adjusted his blankets and brought Robert’s hand up to rest against the breast of his battered coat, just over his heart. 

“The chill is here.”

Robert opened his mouth, but could summon no appropriate reply. Through the coat and the several layers of wool clothing that he wore, Robert could not feel Victor’s heartbeat. His shivering had, however, begun to subside.

For a moment they regarded one another in silence, until Victor began to cough. 

Robert pressed his hands. “Let me fetch you some soup,” he repeated. Victor, with a patiently forgiving look, let him go.

By the time Robert returned, his guest had fallen asleep, and it seemed best not to wake him. Robert instead sat down at his bedside and resumed watching over him, wondering what terrible secret it was that he was keeping, and what strange purpose could have driven him forth into the frozen wilderness. He seemed to be a man fallen from some great height of glory, enfeebled and racked with suffering, yet still dimly radiant, like sunlight diffused through a mist. 

In the months that followed his return to England, it was that mist, and that sunlight, that Robert remembered when he thought of the Arctic. He remembered the ice, and the bright jagged cliffs, and the biting north wind; but never as vividly as he remembered the strangely urgent pressure of Victor Frankenstein’s gray, frostbitten hands.

* * *

Robert stayed with Margaret’s family for more than a year, at her invitation—indeed almost at her insistence. She believed it would do him good, she said. Maybe she believed it would help him to forget the disappointment of his failed adventure, or the mysteries connected with that unexpected visitor who, as she seemed to understand, now consumed all her brother’s thoughts. She tried, day by day, to draw him into the circle of her family, and to restore by the power of her own warmth and affection his passion for life. He appreciated her attentions; but the longer he stayed, the more he withdrew into himself. He took long walks in the countryside. He kept long hours in his bedchamber. He made no plans for the future, but instead preferred to indulge in recollection.

Strangely, he did not see Victor Frankenstein in his dreams. In dreams, he saw towers of ice. They barred his way to something precious and holy, beyond the land of eternal light. Sometimes his ship ran up against their glassy walls and foundered; other times, he dropped anchor at a distance and tried to calculate their height, hoping that they might be scaled. Sometimes he simply gazed and admired their forbidding vastness, as God’s first children must have admired the bright sword of the cherubim guarding the gate of paradise after their exile. From such dreams he often woke with a feeling of aching isolation, and the sense that his northward journey had brought him within tantalizing reach of the sublime, and then snatched it away.

He could not count the number of times that he read back over Victor Frankenstein’s history, or the number of pastoral elegies he judiciously refrained from composing. He pored reverently over the drafts which Victor had marked and corrected, brushing his fingers along the extravagant flourishes of his friend’s handwriting, which blossomed all down the margins of each page. The journal mystified him, for it was written in German, with occasional passages, and sometimes whole pages, in Latin. Even after procuring dictionaries and grammar books in both languages, his efforts at translation proved quite hopeless. Still, he did not dare to put the book at anyone else’s disposal. Sometimes, after struggling for an hour or more to parse out a single sentence, or to decipher the nature of some carelessly ambiguous pen-stroke, he would close the journal and raise it to his lips, breathing deeply as if to imbibe its secret essence—the thought and will behind all its ineffable words—along with the smell and supple texture of its leather binding, which Victor’s hands must have clasped and held many times.

Meanwhile, he sent letters to Geneva inquiring after the Frankenstein family, and particularly the boy Ernest, who seemed to be the sole surviving heir, at least according to his elder brother’s account. Correspondence was slow, however, and it was winter again before Robert finally learned that an estate in the name of Frankenstein had lately been put up for sale. The young man Ernest was rumored to have departed for Italy to live with relatives. 

Local sources confirmed certain parts of Victor’s story, such as the fact that a succession of gruesome murders had shaken the town some years before, and that in their wake, a young man suffering from a nervous disorder, probably connected with the recent deaths in his family, had been confined for several months in an asylum. He had then disappeared from Geneva, and from all living record, a few weeks after his release. Inquiries among the caretakers of several local cemeteries returned, eventually, information about a gravestone that had been set up in Victor’s name over an empty plot, among the graves of his wife, his father, and his youngest brother. 

This had been done during the summer of Robert’s arctic voyage, which meant that Victor himself had been yet alive when his gravestone was inscribed. It seemed likely, therefore, that Ernest, knowing nothing of his brother’s fate, had been obliged to pronounce him dead in order to inherit—and to sell—the family property. After all that had happened, Robert could not blame Ernest for presuming his brother lost forever, as indeed, after all, he was. Still less could he blame the boy for wishing to sever all connections with the place of his upbringing, which must have seemed to him to lie under some terrible, ineradicable curse. 

But as he considered these developments, what struck Robert most forcibly was the realization that, if the property of the Frankensteins was now for sale and soon to pass into other hands, the present moment might well be his only chance to see the haunts of Victor’s youth in something like the state in which Victor himself had known them. In another six months, it might already be too late. Perhaps it was too late even now.

He therefore arranged immediately to travel to Geneva. His sudden plans for departure surprised his sister at first, until he mentioned his destination. Then she sighed. She seemed to have known it would come to this.

* * *

As it turned out, not only the house in Geneva but even the country estate in Belrive had already sold by the time Robert arrived. Though he suspected that the purchase of such a property would have been beyond his means in any case, he had hoped to pose as a prospective buyer, and to request a tour of the house, if only for the satisfaction of his own curiosity. That adventure was now unfortunately out of the question. All the same, he could not resist the temptation to make a journey to Belrive, to see the lake and the mountains, and to wander the grounds where Victor had spent his youth.

The house was still vacant. It was smaller than Robert had imagined, and seemed to be falling into ruin, as though its care had been neglected for many years. Among the trees that stood out front, he noticed a few overgrown stumps, and wondered which of them was the relic of that tree which a fatal thunderbolt had once brought down. 

He walked up the path to the doorstep of the weathered old house, and stood there, reflecting that Victor, too, must have stood in the same place many times. He tried the door. It was locked. The windows all around were covered and dark, closed up like the eyes of the dead.

After all, there was no reason to pry any further into the old house’s secrets. What remained of it now was only a vacant shell, waiting for some new infusion of life. Whatever memories it had once harbored could not be resurrected now. 

Before departing, Robert returned to the door and set his palm against it, tenderly, as if feeling for a pulse. The gesture was one of apology: he had hoped to find in this place some lingering ghost of his friend; or, if that were too much to ask, at least to feel the hollowed shape of the forever-changed space from which his friend was most significantly absent. Back in England, in his sister’s home, he had been feeling Victor’s absence intensely—more intensely, he acknowledged, than their brief acquaintance had given him any real right to feel it—for more than a year. But the loss did not feel different here at Belrive, outside this particular house, among these particular trees. 

On the outskirts of Geneva, the cenotaph marked with Victor’s name made a similar impression on Robert, when he went to see it. It should have spoken wordlessly to him of that radiance that had gone from the world. Its very emptiness should have moved him to tears. Instead, there was simply nothing there.

* * *

Back at the inn where he had procured a room, Robert reflected on the turn his life had taken since that fateful expedition. From the moment he had brought Victor aboard his ship, he had scarcely spared a thought for the rest of the world. All his life, he had always been driven by strong passions, but the passion that drove him now was a most desperate and impetuous one indeed. For what else now was his life’s journey but a futile clasping at revenants—the pursuit of a man who was already dead?

Victor, too, had for years bent all his energy upon a vision that transcended the bounds between the dead and the living. But for Victor there had been an objective, an end: first the creation, and later the destruction of the monster he had conceived. 

Perhaps it was the hope of discovering some suitable end to his own journey that had beckoned Robert toward Geneva. To have mourned at Victor’s gravesite might have brought him some consolation; to have detected some ghostly remembrance of Victor’s past still embodied in his country home at Belrive might have comforted him. But where did such phantoms reside? Robert had made the pilgrimage to Geneva in order to be nearer to the memory of his friend, but he felt now that it was he himself who carried Victor’s memory with him, and was carrying it still, into what seemed to him an otherwise empty space.

What then must he do to reach his journey’s end? Or was his own passionate pursuit destined to drag on and on, as Victor’s had—to torment and weary and perhaps finally consume him? Might he himself become, in a strange belated way, one more accidental victim among the number of those Victor had held dear? 

There were moments when Robert, looking back on the failed ambitions of his youth, and anticipating no better success in the future, felt almost willing to become a final victim to the Frankenstein curse. If he was destined for no leading role in a drama of his own, might he not aspire to play at least a walk-on part in the tragedy of his unfortunate friend? Might not the page of Victor Frankenstein’s glory bear his own name, Robert Walton, though it be only as a footnote? The temptation of curating, preserving, materializing, and reviving his friend’s memory for the greater benefit of mankind almost enthralled him. 

But there were also moments when, more lucidly, he was aware that what had to be done was to bury these relics, before they should succeed in burying him. His fate and that of his friend must otherwise grow hopelessly entwined. Whether he had roused the ghost of Victor Frankenstein from its slumber in Geneva, or had brought the ghost with him down out of the chill arctic wilderness, still the final resolution was the same. He must leave the ghost that haunted him behind, and make his journey back to England alone.

* * *

Robert set his lantern down beside the gravestone where Victor Frankenstein’s name was inscribed. The earth beneath the stone had never been disturbed, the grass never uprooted. No spade had ever touched it, until now.

As he began to dig, Robert thought of the unholy work that Victor himself had done, the graves he had desecrated and the charnel-houses that had furnished matter for his experiments. During the brief time of their acquaintance, Robert had rarely seen Victor smile, and had never seen him laugh; but he thought his friend might have been morbidly amused to observe him now, sweating and digging, rapt in the ceremony of a reverse exhumation. 

He had never dug a grave before, and the work took longer than he’d expected. After marking out a patch of earth as long as his own body, he dug down, and down, and down, until the pit was deep enough to stand inside. At last, drenched in sweat, he clambered back out of the grave to retrieve his lantern. He brought one other item down into the earth with him: the oilskin pouch in which he carried the assorted records of Victor’s history. 

There were letters from Clerval and Elizabeth, written to Victor shortly before their deaths. There were the letters that Victor’s creation had painstakingly transcribed in the course of his strange education. There were the letters which Robert himself had written to Margaret, recording both his encounter with Victor and all that Victor had told him. There were the many pages of corrections, in which Victor had struck out whole passages, or revised them, or expanded them dramatically in a shaking but elegant hand. There were the letters and other documents that Robert had exchanged with his connections in Geneva, including a pile of dated gazette clippings that verified such events as the murder of young William and the execution of Justine. There were Robert’s own sketches of Victor, page after page, along with scattered depictions of the daemon that had been his bane. And there was Victor’s leather-bound journal, in which so many secrets had been kept, and would be kept for all time.

In addition, there were assorted coins of various currencies, which had been found in the sack of provisions that Victor had brought up with him out of his sledge on the day of his rescue. There were two small pieces of jewelry—a pendant and a brooch—which he had carried in his travels, and which must have belonged, many years before, to his mother, Caroline Beaufort. There was a miniature depicting the face of an attractive woman; Robert had not asked, and did not know, whether she was Victor’s mother or his wife. There was the quill with which Victor had made his last manuscript revisions. And there was a single lock of lustrous dark hair: Victor’s hair, which Robert had at first dared to touch only on the pretext of checking his friend for fever, but had later caressed with unembarrassed affection, when Victor was ill, and when he slept, and as the last warmth left his body.

These odd artifacts were now all that remained of Victor Frankenstein, and after communing silently with each of them one last time, Robert placed them back in their protective skin and sealed it carefully before laying it down in the bottom of the empty grave. He then set alongside it one contribution of his own: the silver-plated compass that had guided him to the Arctic, and then guided him back.

Insofar as it was possible to reassemble a man out of disconnected pieces of his world—his solid material things and all the scrawled, embellished, redacted, overwritten, uncertain, indecipherable pieces of his story—these were the pieces that comprised the man that Robert remembered. He had come to bury that man: to free the relics of his material and intellectual being to return to nature, to be reclaimed by the elements. 

It was not until Robert had climbed back out of the grave and begun to fill it with dirt that tears came to his eyes. He wept until the plot was covered over, and then he sat beside it, contemplating its mystery until dawn. 

As the day broke, he gathered up his lantern and directed his steps back toward town, and the world of the living. 

He was ready, at last, to go home.

**Author's Note:**

>   * Translation into 中文 by [Auroradiation](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Auroradiation/pseuds/Auroradiation) available here: **[遗物](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22676920)**
>   * Fan art by [Auroradiation](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Auroradiation/pseuds/Auroradiation) (on Tumblr) **[here](https://auroradiation.tumblr.com/post/190787142599)**
> 


**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [遗物 Relics](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22676920) by [Auroradiation](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Auroradiation/pseuds/Auroradiation)




End file.
